British stockbroker who saved 669 Jewish children during 1938–39 (1909–2015)
A British stockbroker who spent half a century in silence about the 669 children he pulled from Czechoslovakia ahead of the Nazi advance — until a 1988 television ambush sat him in a room full of the lives he'd saved.
Born in 1909 to German-Jewish parents who had settled in Britain, Nicholas Winton was working as a stockbroker when a brief trip to Czechoslovakia in late 1938 showed him refugee children whose families had fled Nazi persecution. He compiled a list of 669 at risk, then returned to London to navigate the bureaucracy: legal paperwork, British sponsors, foster homes. The operation that became the Czech Kindertransport succeeded on the eve of war, and Winton went quiet about it for fifty years. In 1988 the BBC's "That's Life!" reunited him with dozens of those former children and their descendants…
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